Grit Lab Report

Hi Maria,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were universalism, benevolence, and tradition.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.

You said your top three talents were social, spiritual, and analytic.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to go to the gym more .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said go to the gym .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said feel healthier .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said other stuff to do .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: when i am going to shower, i’ll put on gym clothes .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in piano .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt nervous when receiving critical feedback, and nervous when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being school .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Something else .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .

In one word, you said it made you feel happy .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

interest is an emotion
career a, b and c
curiosity makes people like you
crossing the rubicon
you have to explain to kids why you have to do hard things
experts want negative feedback
there is no more miserable human being than the one who has to decide what to do every day
people and relationships are the key to everything
serve one other than yourself

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Allison Dao
It was such a pleasure to meet and get to know you throughout this semester. Your bubbly attitude and willingness to try everything was infectious! I loved how authentic you were, and that showed through your Discovery project and in all of our weekly team discussions. I really enjoyed talking to you and hearing more about your updates every week. I wish you the best of luck during the rest of your time at Penn! It was amazing to see what your Discovery project evolved into. Especially considering the conversations we had at the beginning of the semester regarding your confusion as to what to do, it was amazing to see that your sampling project turned out so well. I thought it was so cool how all of the activities you did for your project ended up being connected to your interest in exploring your curiosity and interests. I thought it was awesome how you took a deep dive into any area you were interested in, from researching more about the Palestine and Israel conflict to having a curiosity conversation with a Catholic priest to watching videos about the debate of religion.
Meera Bathwal
I loved working with Maria this semester! She is incredibly kind and easy to talk to. I thought that she made really good contributions to our team discussions that made it clear that she deeply understood the readings from the prior week. She was great at incorporating personal stories into her comments that were engaging and insightful. Additionally, Maria was a great listener. I always felt like she was truly paying attention to what I was saying and would respond accordingly. I really enjoyed seeing how her Discovery Project came together. She did a sampling project, which was unique and fun to hear about. It was especially interesting to hear about how all of her seemingly disjointed activities ended up fitting together quite nicely. I also thought that Maria did an excellent job of relating her project to course concepts. She touched on the importance of a sampling period and different types of intelligence, such as social intelligence. Overall, it was a pleasure to hear about how her project evolved over the course of the semester, and to see the final product!

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.